This was why Tanisha hated riding the subway late at night. By the time she finished her shift, she was stuck taking a different route because half the trains were on limited service, and it always took her twice as long to get home as it did to get to work. Which wouldn’t be so bad if she didn’t always wind up sharing the car with someone weird like the woman across from her.
The woman had skin so pale that Tanisha wondered if she spent her whole time underground, riding the subway endlessly through the streets of New York and subsisting on spare food scrounged from other passengers. She wore a dark gray top hat over long, silver-blonde hair knotted into stringy dreadlocks that went all the way down to the small of her back, and she wore a pale gray dress with rips and tears all over it-not the kind of rips that came from neglect or wear, but the kind of conscious shredding that only came from someone who wanted to look like they’d just been through a rock tumbler. Under the holes in the fabric, Tanisha could see some sort of old-fashioned petticoat.
She was staring at Tanisha with a magnetic intensity, her eyes so pale blue that they almost looked silver in the harsh fluorescent lighting. The effect was accentuated by a haphazard smear of charcoal under each eye. Tanisha tried to unobtrusively check in her purse to make sure her pepper spray was handy, and glanced up and down the length of the car to see if there was anyone else around.
Of course not. Just her and the weird girl. Tanisha tried to project an aura of indifferent hostility-not looking for a fight, not looking for a conversation, just a tired black woman on her way home and not looking for anyone’s bullshit.
It didn’t work. “You think I’m weird, don’t you?” the woman said, flashing her an unnervingly wide grin. Her voice sounded strange, breathy and slightly hoarse like she’d been talking for a long time without anything to drink.
Tanisha’s eyes widened involuntarily. She tried to cover it by turning the resting bitchface she’d been so carefully cultivating into a friendly smile. “No!” she said, a little louder than she’d originally intended. She could already tell she wasn’t fooling anyone, but she pressed on. “As a matter of fact, I was just admiring your necklace.” She hadn’t actually noticed a necklace, but gothy white chicks attracted jewelry like magnets attracted iron filings.
The weird girl cackled. An actual, honest to god cackle that ripped the air as it echoed through the empty subway car. “You should see your eyes!” she said, between bouts of laughter that made the top hat wobble alarmingly on her head. “They’re the size of silver dollars!” She snorted out a final guffaw before getting herself under control. “You don’t have to feel bad,” she said. “I am weird.”
Tanisha avoided rolling her eyes with a supreme effort of will. Why did some people always have to pretend ‘weird’ was like a video game achievement? “Um, yeah, that’s great,” she said, reaching for her purse, “and I’d love to talk more, but this is my stop coming up so…” She trailed off into an apologetic shrug as she stood up. Actually, the stop was nowhere near her apartment, but she’d wait for another train. Weird Girl was seriously creeping her out.
The train didn’t stop. It just kept rattling through the station without even slowing, the windows outside briefly reflecting dingy yellow light before the blackness came down again like a shutter. Tanisha sat back down, trying not to let the disappointment show on her face. They must have converted this route to an express for the overnight runs.
“It’s okay,” Weird Girl said. “That just gives us more time to talk. Like you were hoping.” She let out a short, explosive chuckle that suggested she knew full well what Tanisha was doing a moment ago. “Do you know what it means when you call someone ‘weird’?”
Tanisha shook her head, resigned to a lecture. Maybe if she just said as little as possible, the other woman would eventually run out of steam.
Weird Girl stood up, evidently preparing a dramatic recitation of the rest of their conversation. “It means that you’re connected to the workings of fate. The Old English, ‘wyrd’, used to mean ‘destiny’, an inescapable doom that was woven into the very fabric of your life. Prophets and seers could foretell your wyrd, but even a hero couldn’t fight it. Struggle against your wyrd all you want, it would come to claim you.”
She punctuated her words with grand, sweeping gestures that revealed a fistful of gaudy silver rings. More of that gothy white chick jewelry. “And over the centuries, that term, weird, became associated not just with fate itself but with those who could see it. The prophets, the soothsayers, the visionaries and witches and hags. They all became weird, and the word came to mean ‘unearthly’. It described someone with strange, unnatural powers.”
The other woman kept moving as she talked, getting uncomfortably close now. Tanisha reached into her purse, getting a good grip on her pepper spray just in case.
“And over time, the other meanings fell away.” She was so close now that Tanisha could smell her, a thick scent of clinging incense so strong that Tanisha recoiled simply from the intensity of it. “The word simply came to mean ‘strange’. Anyone could be weird, just by acting unusual. These days, apparently just playing the accordion is enough to qualify.” She smiled, and Tanisha realized that was meant to be a joke. She might even have laughed, if her flight-or-fight reflexes hadn’t been so jangly.
“But here’s the truth,” Weird Girl said, leaning in to whisper over the sound of the moving train. “Those old meanings? They’re still true. Some people aren’t weird because they’re unusual. They’re not even weird because they have strange, unearthly powers that ordinary people fear and mistrust.” She reached out and stroked her pale finger against Tanisha’s dark skin. “They’re your destiny.”
That was the limit. Weird Girl could yammer all she wanted, she could invade Tanisha’s personal space, but touching her was officially going Way the Fuck Too Far. She pulled out her pepper spray and snarled, “Back right the fuck off, bitch!”
Weird Girl didn’t move. She didn’t even pull her finger away. She just looked down at Tanisha and said, “Even a hero couldn’t fight it. Struggle against your wyrd all you want, it will come to claim you.”
Tanisha almost blasted her with the pepper spray, but she’d probably get some in her own eyes if she used it this close. Instead, she swatted away Weird Girl’s hand and said, “Seriously, fucking back the fuck off!” Her eyes darted left, then right. There wasn’t really much of a way past the other woman that didn’t involve knocking her on her ass, and while Tanisha probably had fifty pounds on Weird Girl, she didn’t feel confident getting into a fistfight with a crazy person.
“It wouldn’t do any good,” Weird Girl said, leaning over Tanisha so that she had to look up to see the other woman’s face. “If I backed away, you’d only see me around the next corner. If you took the next train, you’d sit down right across from me all over again. I’m your fate, woven into the pattern of your destiny. You’ve been heading to me your entire life. You just didn’t know it until now.” She caressed Tanisha’s cheek again, this time with her entire hand.
Tanisha decided she could always wash her face off at the next station. She closed her eyes as tightly as she could and squeezed the trigger, aiming the pepper spray in Weird Girl’s general direction.
Nothing happened.
Or more accurately, nothing came out of the nozzle. Something definitely happened, because Tanisha felt warm, soft lips pressing against her own. Her eyes opened wide in a sudden rush of shock, and she found herself staring into Weird Girl’s silver-blue stare.
Tanisha leaned back, but Weird Girl leaned in at the same time. The net result was that Weird Girl pinned her to the wall with a fierce, passionate kiss that left black lipstick smeared across Tanisha’s lips, all the while fixing her with that same intense stare. Tanisha could feel the other woman’s fingers tangling into her dark, wild curls of hair and pulling her into the kiss.
When the other woman finally pulled away, Tanisha gasped for breath. “You didn’t think this was going to help you, did you?” Weird Girl asked, nodding in the direction of the pepper spray. “Destiny has chosen you to be my next lover, poppet. Fate is preventing this train from stopping until you accept it. Your own body knows the inescapable truth of my words. Why did you think this would work, when the entire universe is telling it not to?”
Tanisha looked at the pepper spray in sudden confusion. She must have done something wrong, that was all. Weird Girl couldn’t be right, this couldn’t be some kind of weird cosmic message telling her to go lezzie for some creepy goth chick she just met. She fumbled with the trigger again, trying to make sure she had the safety catch off, and…
Again nothing. Nothing except Weird Girl straddling her on the bench, a leg on either side, still holding Tanisha’s head with her hands and fixing her with that eerie, unearthly stare. “You’re beginning to accept it now, aren’t you, poppet? I am your destiny.” Tanisha felt her head moving up and down in a slow, lazy nod. Even knowing that the other woman was moving her body, it was still hard to escape the feeling that she was agreeing with those words.
“I am your fate.” She could feel Weird Girl grinding her crotch against Tanisha’s, the torn gray dress slowly inching up Weird Girl’s thighs from the relentless motion. “No matter where you go, you find yourself returning to me. No matter what you do, you find yourself going deeper into my power. You can’t understand it…but you don’t need to. All you need to do is give in.”
She kissed Tanisha again, harder this time. She still didn’t close her eyes, and Tanisha found that she couldn’t either. She felt like that silver-blue stare was seeing right through her, staring past her like she wasn’t even there and pinning her with the intensity of the other woman’s gaze. She felt the heat of the other woman’s body rubbing against hers through their clothes, their nipples scraping against each other and the heat of Weird Girl’s pussy pressing into her own, but it all seemed somehow ethereal under the weight of that stare.
“You can’t fight fate,” Weird Girl said, finally breaking the kiss. “You can struggle against it all you want, but you’re completely helpless in the end.” Tanisha didn’t feel like she could struggle at all. Her limbs felt strangely heavy, as though the other woman was pinning not just her legs but her whole body in position, and she felt like she could barely manage a tiny wriggling motion. And that, she admitted to herself, was just because she was starting to feel a little bit squirmy.
“You can feel it now, can’t you, Tanisha?” Weird Girl asked, moving her head into another slow, lazy nod. “The warp and the weft of destiny, weaving the truth into your mind and your aroused body. You belong to me. You have always belonged to me. Every moment of your life has been leading up to our meeting, to your inevitable fate as my sweet, sexy poppet.”
“I…” Tanisha’s voice sounded strange in her ears, as though she’d forgotten how to speak and was just now relearning. “I don’t-oh!” Her words and her thoughts were both cut off by a sharp burst of pleasure, as Weird Girl found just exactly the right place to rub to send a spike of heat surging through Tanisha’s pussy. “Ohhh,” she moaned again, as the pleasure built to a warm throb in her clit.
“You can’t fight fate,” Weird Girl said, grinding down harder, rubbing more and more of her body against Tanisha.
“I…can’t fight fate,” Tanisha whimpered, the words gently eased out of her by the maddening rhythm of the other woman’s motion against her clit. She didn’t mean to say it; it just slipped out. She didn’t mean to agree with it; her head just kept nodding all on its own. She didn’t mean to believe it, but it felt so good that it must be true. Tanisha couldn’t fight fate.
“Struggling just makes you weaker,” Weird Girl said, moving one hand away from Tanisha’s hair to slide into the waistband of Tanisha’s skirt and finger her wet pussy. Tanisha didn’t even realize how wet she was until she felt the rings on those fingers slide into her without even a hint of resistance.
“Sss…” Tanisha lost the words for a moment as she felt the other woman brush her clit. “Struggling…makes me…nhhh…weaker…” Every word was accompanied by another burst of ecstasy, another surge of pleasure that eroded Tanisha’s will to resist. It was her inescapable fate, she knew that now. She had to let the pleasure overcome her. It was her destiny.
“I am your fate,” the other woman said, fixing Tanisha with the full intensity of her diamond stare, “and I am claiming you.”
Tanisha let out a wordless moan of pleasure as the other woman pumped her fingers into Tanisha’s pussy faster and faster, harder and harder, driving her helplessly into deeper realms of pleasure. She tried to tell herself that it couldn’t be true, that it was just an express train and a broken dispenser and just…trickery…but she couldn’t deny that stare. She couldn’t deny the pleasure. She couldn’t fight her destiny.
She was destined to come under her lover’s touch. And as Tanisha’s orgasm hit, she realized that she didn’t want to fight it at all.
THE END